Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism can be succinctly defined as a perspective dictating that the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people is ideal. Pragmatically, this is hard to refute.

If we are to define utility then we would be compelled to assert it as something that provides some fashion of benefit. Furthermore, when handling matters concerning human productions, benefit would be defined as whatever aids the mentality of humans, or rather, whatever makes humans happier. Therefor, utility coincides with subsequent happiness encouraged from utilization of said utility.

Utilitarianism. The best is what makes the most happy. Seems easy enough, right?

One fatal flaw. Happiness is not all encompassing. The countless variations of emotional state are all vital for integral development. Not a single one can be objectively stated as inferior to another. Happiness as an ultimate goal is a childish perspective of 'good and bad' with ambitions far too restricting. I'll use guilt as an example.

Guilt is an emotion that one feels when they observe that others have found their actions to be inferior or insufficient. When one feels guilt they normally feel obligated to rid the possibility of such guilt occurring in the future. This is true with other 'negative' emotions, as well. I digress. With the attempt to solve the problem of guilt one will better their situation. While they may not immediately remedy all such faults, they will *definitely* produce thoughts that will increase their mental activity in such a way that they will be better equipped for the future. In fact, all situations encountered cause a response that will give the person the *opportunity* to become better equipped for the future. Whether or not somebody is open-minded and creative enough to harness each moment is another thing.

So on the scale of personal development we can see that total happiness would fall short of allowing one to have complete development. Seems obvious, huh?

That's not all. Humans aren't the only thing in this universe, and there is absolutely nothing that causes us to fall under a different criteria for physical interactions. Gravity still affects us. We can't produce things against the will of the ever powerful wavefunctions that persist a stable flow of all universal actions. The most simplest way to put it is, the best is what happens. Because that is what is *stable*. Everything else would make the universe bluescreen. Crash. Kaboom.

So utilitarianism? A *convenient* ideal that should be encouraged in situations in which there are multiple people involved when no other superior system is available. Logically sound? Not quite.

The First Steps in Learning

Is amplifying your capacity to learn. Seems like a catch-22, huh? Learning how to learn? Sounds gnarly. It's actually a very easy process, though, and I'm sure you can do it. I'll be supplying you with a list of different activities, behaviors, and topics. With these you may select the ones that appeal to you and ignore the rest as you see fit. While deciding though, remember that reading all of it will produce the best results.

Best results -> Best learning -> Best information -> Best responses -> Happy

Diet
I cannot stress this too much. The benefits of a good diet are tremendous. It would be nearly impossible to go through all of the different details on how to diet, but there are some very basic measures you should take.

1. Avoid drugs and alcohol. This should be obvious
2. Drink tons of water. A gallon a day if possible.
3. Don't let yourself get hungry. When you're hungry, your body is sending you a panic response.
4. Take a multivitamin designed for your profile (age, gender). This will ensure that you get all of the proper vitamins your body and mind needs.
5. Invest in some Fish Oil. The Omega-3 fatty acids support development of your brain.
6. If you have internet handy ... look up the foods you're eating. Some things may surprise you.

Lifestyle
Lifestyle changes are also fundamental aspects of improving your brain, assuming you don't already have amazing lifestyle choices.

1. Get enough sleep. I know that if you woke up at 4 in the afternoon on Sunday going to bed at 11 doesn't make much sense. So don't. But don't stay up all the way until six AM like you did the night before when you were out practicing bad habits. (; Go to bed the second to feel tired.
2. Exercise. At least do something. This will improve memory, reaction times, catalyze new nerve cell formation, increase neurotrophins, promote nutrient delivery, increase volume of certain neural regions, and inhibit the thinning of your cerebral cortex.
3. Keep your mind stimulated. You can do this in a large number of different ways. Like any sorts of puzzles? Maybe you like writing? Do these things when you wake up and your brain will be ready to accept and organize information for the rest of the day.
4. Learn new words. The more words you can formulate situations in the more accurate your internal model of representing the world about you will be. Don't do a word of the day system. I've done those. They don't work. Just learn a single word, use it until you master it and move on to the next. I like to take new words I use and apply them to the specific terminology they would be present in.
5. Listen to music when not anything else. This is a very simply lifestyle changes that will build intelligence and neurons in otherwise untouched regions.

Topics
There are definitely topics that you should learn before learning other topics. In fact, you've probably noticed that there are classes you can only take after you've taken prerequisites. Well, there's a topic that I find to be a prerequisite for all learning, and that topic is Logic.

LOGIC
Logic is a very well defined science. There is very little art to it at all. In fact, top debaters don't even worry about logic anymore because they've mastered it, and the debate becomes entirely about using deception and creative tactics. There are plenty of ways to work on your logic (go chess!), but this is my method:

Facts and Inference: We know what facts are and what opinions are. I think opinion is a term that people use for preferences when they don't know the reason that they have that opinion. I think opinions are stupid. (: Inferences are conclusions that we draw from the facts. Like, (premise, fact) pain hurts, (premise, fact) this person is in pain, (conclusion, inference) this person hurts.

Also, don't just blindly accept your own opinions, always try to rationalize your reasons. My conscious might say I prefer fruit to candy, but I'll have to think further to outline the reasons of that preference. Maybe I do like candy more but I'm stuck in the *shallow conscious* mindset that I like fruit more. It might not be true even though I'm saying it. Though, upon further investigation I can find the reasons like it's healthier, tastes better, promotes a better mood, etc.

Argument: An argument must have all of these to be complete:

1. Stated thesis Arguing can go on forever if somebody doesn't know what they're arguing against
2. One or more premises Otherwise you're simply stating a conclusion. Make sure your premises are logical or concrete facts, and if necessary have premises for your premises
3. Conclusion Your premises need to lead to something. Kinda ridiculous not tell the opposing views _what_ it leads to
4. Acknowledgment of opposing views Otherwise you're kinda just stating information

Don't leave room for error. If somebody asks a question or makes a statement, do not sit there trying to figure out what was implicit about what they were saying. Ask for further details if necessary, or, if possible, just answer it straight-forward. This leaves a lot less room for error and the ever so popular red herring (a reply that does not reference the original issue).

Signification: Not everyone will assume the same mental image or thought to the same words. Environmental development is different for pretty much everyone, so not everyone will be relating in the same exact way. For example, if I say "Soup Bowl", not everyone is going to be able to picture the same soup bowl in their head because not everyone has seen the same soup bowls.

That brings us to

Definition: When you use a term, be sure to define exactly what you mean by it. Not everyone will define the same term the same way unless the person who introduces the term sets exactly what it's supposed to mean for the discussion. Arguing over the definition of a term is also rather ridiculous because the presenter of the term and thus the presenter of related data concerning use of the term is ... well, presenting a term. A set variable that holds information that is being discussed. If you want the term to mean something different, just present a _different_ term.

Logical fallacies. I'm sure everyone has heard at least one person call out a logical fallacy, possibly even in Latin. I do it. If you can simply identify the exact reason why something is wrong, there's no more need to consider it's right. It's not. There's no debate. This is a nice feeling, and leads to a much clearer mental environment. Learn your logical fallacies. There are too many to list so hit up Google and Wikipedia. Eventually it will become second nature, if you're dedicated.

Deduction and Induction: There are two types of logic. Induction is informal, but practical. If everybody said a movie was bad, then it's probably bad, but that's that deductive, ergo, it's not essentially true. Induction is a method of making conclusions based on patterns. Deduction, however, is a method of making conclusions based on cold hard facts.

Assume the following statements are true:
The man has a hat.
Hats are worn on the head.

Then we can deduct that:
The man is wearing a hat on his head.

Boring, but once you get comfortable with it you will be making some very exquisite deductions that will make you the envy of all of your friends ... or something.

OTHER TOPICS
Significantly less important topics that can improve your ability to learn include the following:

1. Linguistics
2. Mathematics
3. Physical Sciences
4. English (especially if you don't have a high school understanding of it)

(:

How much you can suck at aiming a ball

In the sports of Basketball and Soccer your goal is to get a ball into a net. I've decided to calculate the number of degrees that you can make the shot within while still having the ball going into the net.

Soccer
*This assumes a 24 ft wide net and that you are in front of one of the net.
F(x) =  57.3(8/x)
Where x = distance from net in yards
("8/x" calculates radians, and multiplying by 57.3 converts that to degrees)

This outputs roughly:

05y: 91.7 deg

10y: 45.9 deg

15y: 30.6 deg

20y: 22.9 deg

25y: 18.3 deg

30y: 15.3 deg

40y: 11.5 deg

50y:  9.2 deg

As you can see, the further you get away from the net the substantially harder it is to make sure that you're shooting within the right range.

Basketball
*This assumes a 17" hoop, 9.4" ball and that you are aiming for the hoop, not the backboard. I am also considering the range in which the ball can hit the rim and still go in, which makes the arc that you can shoot into roughly 14.3" wide.

F(x) = 57.3(1.2/x)

Where x = distance from hoop in feet

05 ft: 13.8 deg

10 ft: 6.9 deg

15 ft: 4.6 deg

20 ft: 3.4 deg

25 ft: 2.8 deg

30 ft: 2.3 deg

FREETHROW: 5.3 deg

THREE POINTS: 3.5 deg 

Ok, so if you play basketball and know what percentage of the time you make Freethrows you could theoretically calculate the amount of times you will land three pointers. Neat, huh? Just run this function:
F(x) = 3.5/(5.3/x)
Where x = percentage of time you make a freethrow (without the backboard) in decimal
Note: If you replace 3.5 with the degrees from another distance your result will correspond to that one.


Trigonometry sucks.

Fitness, Now Start Exercising

Ok, you got your diet down. You're feeling way better. If you did it right then you even have your own favourite multivitamin. Clearly you are not super toned and jacked, though, and you know you have to exercise for that. However, it does prove to be a little daunting to figure out where to start when you see all sorts of people doing all sorts of things for their exercise. So first things first, we have to define your goal!

Are you trying to improve for a sport? Then maybe you should figure out which exercises will supplement that the best and work with that. Or maybe this is something more general, like getting buff or strong, or maybe you want to be able to run for days on end. Unfortunately, you can't train all these types of fitness at once.

Endurance
Do you want endurance? Well that means you are going to be trying to stimulate your type I muscle fibers, AKA your slow twitch muscle fibers. These fibers aren't as large as their fast twitch counterparts but they do have their own unique role of allowing one to sustain stress for a long period of time. In order to gain endurance you will also want to be working on your heart, generally in the form of cardio. If you want to do weight training then you'll probably be focusing on doing high reps with less weight.


Strength and Speed
So yeah tearing phonebooks in half and bending iron rods with your bare hands is pretty cool too, so how do you get that? Well, strength, speed and explosiveness is generally found in the form of fast twitch muscle fibers. Sorta the opposite of endurance, you'll want to focus on doing sprinting and very heavy resistance for only a few reps to gain strength. Some people shy away from this thinking they aren't making any gains because their muscles aren't sore, but that's because they have a misconception of how strength and muscle works together.

You see, muscles do not produce linear strength. This is why the 150 lb powerlifter can outlift the 300 lb bodybuilder. First, lets look at the flight or fight response. When you are undergoing an adrenaline rush you get stronger, faster and smarter. If you have the capability of doing this, then clearly you are not using 100% of potential otherwise. That's because your CNS restricts you from preforming at a level which may damage you. It doesn't want you to bench 315 because that's *scary*. So what you need to do to get stronger isn't really build muscle, but rather convince your CNS that you are capable of doing what it thinks you can't. This comes from doing really, really heavy, hard things.

Cardio
The heart is your most important muscle. Having good cardiovascular function will provide a plethora of benefits ranging from immune system strengthening to improved social activity. No matter which other type of fitness you pursue you should always do some sort of running/jogging/biking/whatever in order to keep your heart strong. The human heart beat is finite!

Flexibility
Similar to how you only use part of your muscular capacity, you only stretch as far as your body thinks is safe. Flexibility is a very easy part of fitness to implement within one's routine. Convenient times to stretch or do yoga would be in the morning and after (not before) exercise. If you do any form of stretching other than dynamic you risk tearing soft muscle tissue, which could lead to injury during exercise.


There's are lots of different pursuits that you can have with your fitness, but as long as you focus on the right areas you should be able to apply the same simple concepts to all of them.

Did you hear about that Egypt thing?

So as some of you may know, I am 100% Egyptian. There is quarrel in my home country and it is my duty to evangelize those of our situation! Doom may come! But together we are strong!


First lets get some facts out:
Hosni Mubarak is the President of Egypt at the moment. Some people hate him. Some like him.
Riots and Protesters are abundant within the streets of Egypt.
They even took away Facebook.

So what's going on over in Egypt? Well, besides the poverty, unemployment, and a surplus autocratic governmental corruption, people can't even use Twitter any more! Which was blocked due to people collaborating protests against Mr. Mubarak. Some slightly less humane measures are being taken such as tear gas and baton beat downs, whatever. Freaking internet access country-wide was abrogated and thus many organizations and companies that were not even involved with primitive protesting are suffering due to this cat fight. At least they're letting the relatively affable military handle this instead of the police.

Anyways, enter stage left, USA. Aside from Israel, Egypt, parasitically, receives more aid from the USA than any other country. More than 1.5 billion dollars.  Naturally, we're marching over there to see what's going on with our investment. Some of them, including reporters and human rights activists, are getting arrested and thrown in jail, or even being beaten by "gangs" that support the President. Anyways, back to the elite. Obama has been taking some actions to communicate with Hosni in attempts to persuade him to resign, allowing an interim, or provisional, government to be formed ... kinda like the one in Iraq. Either that or transfer the power of the government over to VP Omar Suleiman. A situation worth following.


With possible more than 300 people dead and a lot more wounded we have quite an itch on our planet.

Book: The Dumbest Generation

So I was perusing Barnes and Noble when I had perceived a peculiar book protruding out of my Mathematics section. I quickly procured the culprit for further interrogation when I noticed that it was a book detailing why people underneath the age of 30 are stupid. Baffled, I had to prod further, which promptly led to me polishing the book off on the spot.

At first I was highly skeptical seeing as we are, in fact, the information generation. In addition to that we score higher on IQ tests than ever before. However, the book happened to boast a very wide base of statistical information (probably why it was in the math section) that made it hard for me stop reading. Though, a lot of these statistics (there were a lot so I'm not going to list them) really seemed like they were only partial evidence and neglected other information. It's fairly easy to get information to fit a theory (instead of the other way around), after all. After reading it I do find a lot of the points made hard to refute.

Affirmative
There was a lot of stress on the way that today's youth allocates their time. Natural, seeing as most of us are guilty of watching too much television or playing too many unproductive games. However, because we prefer playing those games and watching those movies instead of furthering our education the industries have reflected this behavior. This is a poisonous downward trend, but should eventually taper off.

Negative
Ugh, books, really? I know I'm writing about a book right now and clearly I do read books, but this book really stressed that people don't read books anymore. A large amount of that statistic could easily be attributed to all the alternative sources we have. Fiction is easily replaced by stories within video games and movies, which are definitely becoming more intellectual. Nonfiction is even more easily replaced by Wikipedia. Furthermore, games require one to make decisions and plan out their agenda whereas books do not. Books are becoming obsolete.

Especially classics. They're classics. We have vastly superior contemporaries. Screw the 20's.


Affirmative
Nobody really seems to know much about what's going on with the government or with the world in general. That sorta segregates the youth from political decisions that they would have otherwise been able to be a part of. We, our generation, is going to be running this country and every single city in it. Look at your friends, which one do you trust to do it? Got one? Good, now how many more can you count?


Negative
This book also tends to focus on the USA in regards to other countries. Which is kinda weird to me seeing as we have all kinda meshed into a single community. One that fights with their neighbors, but a single community nonetheless. We have very good methods of information exchange and communication that allow us to easily breach cultural and physical boundaries when it is wished. Segregation of countries is a very classical approach to demographics.

Extremes
There is also the total exclusion of extremes in this book. Back in the 50's if somebody wanted to be a mathematician then they have a physically limited ability to study math. This is not true in the information age. If somebody wanted to be an amazing mathematician, there is nothing stopping them from knowing it all. If somebody really wanted to become an expert at absolutely anything they wouldn't be stopped, and because of this capacity the chances that somebody will develop an extreme ability with a given subject is bound to be much better.


Check this book out if you'd like, but take it with a grain of salt and don't be too quick to internalize all the skewed presentation of the statistics.

6 Parts of a System

After brushing up on Aristotle's 'Parts of an Object' I decided to assemble and supply diction for my own, similar rendition, titled

6 Parts of a System

First lets define a couple things
Universal System: The all encompassing entity of the mechanical universe.
Isolated System: An arbitrarily designated subsystem within the universal system.

Now let us carry on...

1. Location
First and foremost it does well to designate what the coordinates and boundaries are within a system. Whether this is universal, galactic, global, local, or inside a given room or not is up to the person defining the system.


2. Time
There will always be a birth followed inevitably by a death when it comes to systems. Very literally, the system of one's person will eventually cease to exist. This is true with everything and therefor applying time boundaries as well as physical boundaries makes a lot of sense.


3. Relation
There is going to be some sort of reason why an isolated system is partitioned from the universal system. For example, when handling most matters on our planet we don't consider what other planets might think about it, since we can only work within our realm anyways. Another example may be that we want to look at how Facebook works and therefor would define an isolated system for substances related to Facebook. The relationship between the entire system would be that they all have something to do about Facebook.

4. Substance
There are going to be items within a given system. For example, our global isolated system includes countries, oceans, mountains, people, paperclips, and buttons. A chemist could sum this stuff up much easier in terms of which chemicals are naturally found on Earth, however, we have linguistics to help us with this. In linguistics we take arbitrarily defined sets of atoms (like those within a button) and classify them. So lets say that within the isolated system that is the room that you're sitting within there are the substances {You, Desk, Computer, Chair} etc. These substances also have certain properties or...

5. Attributes
This one is easy. Colours, weight, height, sound, smell, taste, etc. Basically all the properties of a substance that you can assimilate with your senses. Next!

6. Activity
Last but certainly not least there is activity. Look around you and you'll notice that some things are animate and some things are inanimate. There's also activity that you can perceive quite so adeptly with your senses including gravity, drafts, and radioactive decay, for example. Also, there are two types of activity. Intraactivity and Interactivity. I made these words up. Intraactivity would be all activity that is happening within an isolated system, such as your heart beating within the system of your body, whereas interactivity is activity that is happening to an isolated system or from an isolated system. For example, if you say you're room is an isolated system and a car drives into it then you just suffered some serious interactivity.


Khrisstian: 1
Aristotle: 0

Fitness, From the Top

I find myself training people or giving advice to people about fitness as part of my daily life. Something that I can never really fit in, but find to be the most important part for any new fitness enthusiast, is how to get your diet down. The reasons this is the initial issue that needs to be fixed is attributed to the following

Why begin with your diet?

1. Muscles aren't Everything

Alright, lets say you're the person that eats whatever you want and goes to the gym (also probably whenever you want) in order to build fitness. You probably even see some progress. Well, if you're not eating well while your muscles are getting enough fuel to get bigger and stronger (bigger probably because you're just now filling out your natural frame. Stronger because your CNS was so inefficient before) then your organs are probably having some difficulty keeping up. This is because every day you work out your organs have to deal with the breakdown of your body as well and aren't getting all the proper support they need. You can't keep this up for long before your body rejects you from making any more progress.


2. Muscle is Rebuilt in the Kitchen

Going to the gym does not necessarily make you stronger. For example, when fresh to working out and when after working out one can no longer perform as well athletically. That's because the person's muscle fibers are all ripped up and need some time healing back together. The only way they can do that is if they are properly fueled. This comes from a good diet. Another note, if you tear your fibers up too bad don't expect them to heal up very quickly. So if you work out biceps every day a week, there's the reason you still have 13" Pythons. ;)

3. Healthier

Because everything you do will be effected by the support of a good diet whereas only certain operations are effected by the support of good exercise; most notably, your capacity to experience and internalize information related to fitness objectively.

4. Required

No matter where somebody start with their fitness pursuits, this is always something that they will be required to eventually do.



How to diet


Step 1: Organization

One can't expect to have very luxurious understanding and success when it comes to projects, including a diet plan, unless they're organized. Keep track of what you eat. Now don't go overboard and try to write down every calorie and every type of calorie if you don't want to. Just do something that works for you. maybe that's just taking a glance and what's on the label and trying to remember it. You must however, be reading nutrition facts. ;)

Step 2: Information

The best result will always come from the most informed decision. Before you try throwing together a random diet based on what people tell you and the media shows you it does well to read a tad; not talking about reading all the latest gimmicks and what _exact_ food may be something to avoid, but rather the physiology and science behind what you are eating. Here's a inquisition method you could use to progressively learn relevant information:

1. What does protein do? What about carbs? And now fat?
2. What are all the types of fats? Trans? Saturated? Unsaturated?
3. Complex carbs vs. simple carbs?
4. What do amino acids do? Enzymes?
5. How long does it take for certain foods to digest?
6. What are ways digestion might be slowed down or sped up?
7. What are all these micronutrients and vitamins for?
8. Can I overdose on different vitamins?

You better have your own questions by here. :P


Step 3: Motivation

You probably won't like doing things you don't want to, so a little motivation can help. If you want you can keep track of your measurements, weight, exercise stats, etc. Other things like how fast you can solve a Sudoku (lame) puzzle are effected by health, too, keep in mind. Learn some neat quotes, whatever. Just keep yourself interested! (I do this by learning new things in the field (: )



By the way. You can use those same three steps for doing anything.

You're welcome (: